Highlights:

The Black Church

From its earliest inception, the Black church in America has been viewed as a dichotomy. Some scholars and historians view the Black church as the foremost institution for creating individual, systemic and political change in the Black community. A safe haven to worship God together and a place to be motivated to build the community. A refuge where social justice could be sought and personal, family and community protection and empowerment encouraged.

Interview with Mayor Gusciora

TNN – Mr. Mayor during your 2018 state of the city address you stated you will be hiring new police recruits’ The Trenton Police & Fire Fighters are concerned about rumors of lay offs..
Mayor Gusciora – The Police & fire Fighters can rest assure there will be no lay offs There are too many unemployed people in Trenton.

Kelly Ganges top 100

Kevin “Kelly” Ganges chief of staff and right-hand to Mercer County Executive Brian Hughes was named as one of the 100 most powerful individuals in the state. Ganges is in complete control of county government in Mercer County and has the complete confident of the County Executive Hughes.

So another little girl is dead

Tuesday, Shaela Johnson was gunned down on Stuyvesant Ave. Two very sick young men shot more than twenty rounds taking her young, beautiful life away.
Now two or three more families and so many friends are left to grieve and wonder why.
We so often forget in our awe, disgust, surprise, anguish, that real people are left behind; mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, grandmothers, grandfathers, aunts, uncles, cousins, sons and daughters, nieces and nephews and a host of friends.

Mallence Bart-Williams was born in Cologne (Germany) from a German mother and a Sierra-Leonese father. Her father, Gaston Bart-Wiliams, was a writer activist and the first film director of Sierra Leone. After the ten year long civil war in Sierra-Leone, she was finally able to revisit to her father’s country in 2008, where she met street children from the notorious Lion Base Gang. She felt compelled to do Something and eventually founded the creative collective Folorunsho with 21 street kids. Their design collaborations were sold internationally and with the proceeds the kids were able to go to school and pay for school fees accommodation, etc… Mallence is a multifaceted creative social entrepreneur and has explored the realms of writing, publishing, film making, creative direction and fashion design among other things. She pursued her studies in economics and finance in Paris, Singapore, and Great Britain. Today she lives and works across the globe, producing an all-natural cosmetics line in Asia, runs an educational fund for orphans in Sierra Leone and works with Young innovators from the African continent.

By Kylie Kiunguyu on November 1, 2018 — Evariste Akoumian, a 37-year-old Ivorian, invented the “Solarpak”, a schoolbag with a solar panel and a lamp, to improve the education of young schoolchildren from rural, non-electrified areas. Using the lamp, children can now comfortably study after dark.

In a packed courtroom on Aug. 30 at the Juanita Kidd Stout Criminal Justice Center before Judge Leon Tucker, Mr. Abu Jamal’s attorney Judith Ritter successfully argued that a May 5, 1988, letter from the office of then-District Attorney Ron Castille to a state representative discussing death penalty cases was important. Later, as a state Supreme Court justice, Mr. Castille was personally involved in the case.

He refused to disqualify himself when Mr. Jamal’s case came before the high court despite having been the Philadelphia district attorney during prior appeals. The United States Supreme Court ruled such conduct was unconstitutional.

Judge Tucker extended the period of discovery to allow the search for more evidence that may link Justice Castille to the new document. The new court date for arguments is scheduled for Oct. 29

N’s mother tried to kill her the day she was born. Her mother, B, was a student when she got pregnant. “I did not have my head in the pregnancy. I was never sick. The only thing I was thinking of was my studies,” she said.

She delivered at home with her boyfriend, who told her to throw the baby in the septic tank. They did, then B went to school. She fainted and her teachers took her to the hospital, where the doctors determined she had just given birth. Though she denied it, the police went home and found newborn N alive in the septic tank. She still has a scar on her cheek where her face hit the edge of the tank when her parents threw her in. When N survived, B said, “I cried a lot, I regretted what I had done. I always said, if one day God gives me a child, I would take care of it.”

Now three years old, N lives with her maternal grandmother while her mother serves time in prison for attempted infanticide.

Olivia Hooker, 103, poses at her White Plains home. Hooker is one of the last surviving witnesses of the Tulsa Race Massacre. (Michael Noble Jr. for The Washington Post

B.C. Franklin, a Greenwood lawyer and the father of famed historian John Hope Franklin, wrote a rare firsthand account of the massacre later donated to the National Museum of African American History and Culture.

“The sidewalk was literally covered with burning turpentine balls,” he wrote. “For fully forty-eight hours, the fires raged and burned everything in its path and it left nothing but ashes and burned safes and trunks and the like that were stored in beautiful houses and businesses.”

On June 1, 1921, martial law was declared. Troops rounded up black men, women and children and detained them for days.

Sugar Land, Texas — “The ‘convict lease system’ was a crime against humanity. It began right after enslaved people won their freedom. People have made millions of dollars off the free labor of our enslaved and imprisoned ancestors,” said Kofi Taharka, national chair of the National Black United Front. As she spoke, she was standing across the street from the old Imperial Sugar factory.

Ninety-five graves were unearthed in Sugar Land this summer as construction workers were building a school on property sold to the school district by the Texas prison system